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Conscious consumerism has become bigger than a short-lived fad.

In the pre-pandemic times, brands started to notice more people questioning their lifestyle choices and pushing for a change (thanks Greta!). Responsibility has been used as a Gen-Z marketing tool increasingly appealing to other demographics as well.

One such app is YAYZY, an eco-lifestyle tracking app that shows the carbon footprint of your purchases in real-time.

The makers of the app built it inspired by the belief that action begins with information. Their app raises awareness of sustainable lifestyle alternatives to travel, fashion, food, and more.

Now, with all the surprises that 2020 brought us, people are cutting back on excessive shopping and considering other lifestyle choices, cooking bread at home, anyone?

Consumers are not alone. Makers are increasingly more interested in combating climate change by combining Fintech and Cleantech.

There is no shortage of environment-protecting initiatives that popped up in the last couple of years. Here are some simple and some creative ways to become a more conscious consumer:

Website Carbon Calculator shows how much CO2 your website emits.

Kuri suggests low-carbon recipes and adapts to what's in season around you.

Wren offsets your carbon footprint by saving rainforests.

Capture wants to be the Fitbit for your carbon footprint by tracking your mobility and food choices.

Sliced finds opportunities that have a direct impact on reversing climate change.

Climatebase curates climate-positive jobs, organizations, and events.

Climatescape is an open directory of organizations creating solutions to climate change.

Collective.Energy is a community for crowdsourcing and launching climate solutions.

Enviro.Work is a job board for environmentally positive work that benefits the environment.

Carbonly is an online carbon footprint tracker that plants a tree for every new install.

Carbon Trim is an app for discovering carbon footprints of daily actions.

Vera for Business makes it simple for your business to stop ocean plastic.

Tripit shows your flight’s carbon emissions and provides ideas on how to reduce it.

Joro is the “Fitbit of carbon emissions”.

Last month, college student Liam Porr tricked everyone and went viral on Hacker News with a GPT-3 generated fake blog post. In his own words, “it was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.”

We’ve seen a ton of GPT-3 powered projects since it was introduced by OpenAI in July. Yesterday, scientist and maker, Samanyou Garg launched another one: Magic Email, an app that summarizes and generates emails using AI.

The creator of previously well-received TLDR This extension returned with a GPT-3 powered email assistant that summarizes and generates professional emails from one-liners. It’s currently in beta, join now to get early access.

Whether it’s fake news or smart algorithms, AI is taking over communication. With tools like GPT-3, there will be even more innovation and viral stunts.

From email summaries, narrated podcasts, copywriting to networking, AI is capable of replacing boring time-sucking communication habits.

Here are some other promising AI-powered products from the community:

Say Less works inside Gmail so you can write shorter emails with AI.

Kriya AI finds relevant professionals and writes smart email intros.

VWO Humans vs AI is a competition to test GPT-3 generated web copy against humans.

Kafkai is a fully AI-powered unique content generator.

Podcastle converts to natural human speech podcasts using machine learning.

GPT-3 Job Description Rewriter does exactly what it says using OpenAI's GPT-3 model.

LALAL.AI uses AI to split any song into vocal and instrumental tracks.

Shortly is an AI creative writing assistant generating new creative plots and story developments.

Zoom hosts 300 million meetings daily. 🤯

While most meetings are intended to be productive, you can still have some fun with Zoom custom backgrounds.

We’re seeing a rise in the number of projects aimed to make Zoom more self-expressive (and hide the mess behind your desk chair). Transport yourself to the Simpsons’ living room or recreate your pre-COVID office space.

Here are a few projects you might want to check out before your next meeting:

3D Rooms Project makes illustrated iconic rooms available as free Zoom backgrounds.

Actionable is a way to personalize your Zoom with QR codes and interactive backgrounds.

Zoom Exotic is pretty self-explanatory bringing you 100+ exotic video backgrounds.

VirtualOffice brings branded virtual offices for your remote team's Zoom meetings.

Canva has a free Zoom background creator with over 100 templates and customization options.

HiHello lets you add your name, title, company, and logo to your virtual background.

HavePride.in is a custom virtual Zoom background generator supporting LGBTQ+ Pride.

Zoom Background curates 1000+ free crowdsourced backgrounds for your next meeting.

Self-awareness is going mainstream. People are seeking answers within fueling the rise of meditation and a curious self-discovery trend.

Yesterday, Ronan Levy, self-proclaimed metaphysical outlaw, and Kori Harrison launched Trip, an app for your psychedelic trips.

It’s an app to accompany you through meditation, breathwork, and, well, tripping. Use it for intention setting, mood tracking, personalized music, and guided journaling.

While not openly mentioned, psychedelics have been around for years and many people you probably have heard of such as Steve Jobs, Aldous Huxley, Bill Gates, and The Beatles, mention their experience as life-changing.

Outside of Silicon Valley and Burning Man circles, psychedelics are still surrounded by many taboos and laws. But science is advancing rapidly and people are more open to alternative treatments.

Head of Product, Kori Harrison explained their evidence-based and responsible approach while designing Trip. “We spoke with experienced and new trippers, guides, psychologists, medical doctors, and combined those insights with the research from Mendel Kaelen, Stanislav Grof, MAPS, Roland Griffiths, Robin Carhart-Harris and others.”

Ronan Levy is the co-founder of Field Trip, a sort of spa for your mind. The company behind the app offers legal psychedelic-enhanced therapy, mindfulness, and self-care with a series of sessions with trained psychotherapists.

Field Trip is open for business in New York, Toronto, and LA opening soon. The company plans to open 75 clinics in North America by 2024, Wired reports.

It would be naïve to assume that people don’t experiment (we know what you did there). While the app is useful for any kind of mood-tracking and journaling, it’s been built specifically for people self-medicating, even more now while stuck at home.

If you’re curious to learn more, check out Field Tripping, a new podcast about psychedelics, and people.

Today’s newsletter was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Brex.

Brex Cash first appeared on our scene last year, hunted while in public beta by long-time community member Chris Messina. The launch was one of the most upvoted of the day and received promising early feedback from the community:

“Zero fees is a game changer” – Ellen

“Brex is taking over! Appreciate the rewards still + some yield…” – Caelan

“I really like the way Brex implemented the integration of Cash with the card... they make it as simple as possible” – Dalton

Brex has since publicly launched Brex Cash—you can now sign up in minutes (and from home). Customers immediately get access to $0 ACH and wire transfers (including internationally), with no limits on how many you can send.

Combined with a high-limit Brex Card (up to 10-20x higher limits with no personal guarantee), spend management features, and integrations like QuickBooks and Netsuite, Brex Cash lets businesses run from a single dashboard, saving you time so you can focus on scaling your business instead of worrying about housekeeping. (They’re reporting up to 10 hours a week on time saved per customer). The built-in receipt matching is a nice touch, too. Nobody enjoys submitting expenses (but if you do, can you submit ours? 😉).

In addition, Brex offers multipliers like 7x on rideshare, 4x on travel, 3x on restaurants, and 2x on software, and for those more tailored to remote teams, it’s offering 7x on collaboration tools like Slack, and Zoom, and 3x on food delivery services like Caviar and Doordash.

From cash management and credit cards to spend controls, Brex allows complete finance management all in one place. You can apply here.

NB: Businesses need to be US based in order to sign up for Brex. For important disclosures and more information, click here.

Terms subject to change. Brex Inc. provides a corporate card. The Brex Mastercard® Corporate Credit Card is issued by Emigrant Bank, Member FDIC.

Brex Treasury LLC is an affiliated SEC-registered broker-dealer and member of FINRA and SIPC that provides Brex Cash, a program that allows customers to elect to sweep uninvested cash balances into certain money market mutual funds or FDIC-insured bank accounts at program banks. Investing in securities products involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Brex Treasury is not a bank and your Brex Cash account is not a bank account. Please see brex.com/cash for important legal disclosures. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.

Late payments cost small businesses $3 trillion per year, Sage reports.

Whaaat?

Yesterday, Colin Gunnell and Adam Farah introduced Penny, an instant invoice payment platform.

Inspired by the freelance struggles and unexpected business expenses (dropped MacBook, anyone?), Penny makes it easier to get paid.

Getting paid is a real struggle as highlighted by the community members:

“This is a sweet idea. Before moving into building podcast SaaS I began my career as a freelancer and suffered at the hands of people simply paying late because they were bigger businesses and simply could.” – Mark Asquith

“This sounds amazing! As an influencer I am forever waiting for brands to pay my invoices (longest I've waited is 3 months!) so defo gonna have a look at this. Is it any hassle to the client?” – Helena Lester-Card

The gig economy was growing pre-COVID but now it’s been accelerating as more people are exploring alternative career options. In recent years, we’ve seen tons of innovation that makes capital more accessible to people who need it the most.

Here are some of the tools available from setting up your company, to getting paid to global health insurance:

Stripe Atlas is a service to handle everything involved in establishing an internet business.

Cushion helps freelancers forecast, schedule, and track invoices.

75 Ways to Get New Clients lists actionable ideas to secure your next client.

Betterlance is an automated CRM built with freelancers in mind.

Williams & Harricks send real, physical demand letters to get your invoice paid.

Upflow is a SaaS tool integrated with your accounting software.

Lean Hire makes the talent hiring process easier and faster.

Deel simplifies compliance and payments at scale for companies working with contractors.

Remote Health provides insurance (pandemics included) for remote teams and individuals.

M-Files survey shows that 83% of employees recreate existing work documents because they can’t find them in their company network.

Conclusion? Documentation sucks.

Yesterday, Joaquin Roca launched Minerva a dynamic way to share processes online. It’s the modern day Clippy, but with less eyebrows.

With this Chrome extension, you can easily capture and share clickable instructions for anything on the internet. No screenshots, red arrows, or screencap videos needed.

Documenting processes, SOPs (standard operating procedures), and internal workflows can be a pain to write, but are crucial precautions for well-functioning orgs.

Having recently secured a $1.1M seed round, Minerva aims to simplify documentation for customers, colleagues, and trainees.

The launch was well received by the Product Hunt community:

“It’s great to watch someone’s face light up after about the third minute of a product demo. Minerva has truly solved a very annoying problem.” – Brian Cohen

“Minerva is a dream come true! No more lengthy documentation and lost or unscalable process knowledge!” – Tania Luna

“I am a fan of this product because of how easy it makes it for anyone to create, share and follow directions. Some processes online take SO many clicks, hovers, drop-downs and new windows that open, which can be confusing.” – Amy Chen

Here are some more products to help you with interactive onboarding, documentation, and online training:

Scribe watches you work your magic and automatically turns what you do into a PDF guide.

Helppier integrates with Canva designs so you can create popups, banners, and tours.

UserGuiding is an easy way to show how your product works.

Landbot is the no-code conversational app builder.

Donut makes it easy to customize and automate onboarding journeys, right in Slack.

OnboardFlow makes sense of your trials and shows how to convert more of them.

Page Flows is a library of user flow videos and screenshots from popular products.

flowmapp is a simple tool for creating user flow diagrams.

Personably creates amazing on-boarding experiences for new hires.

But if you want to add Clippy to your site for every visitor, use this.

Dropbox’s referral program is one of the most famous cases of referral marketing. Thanks to incentivized invitations Dropbox has more than 600 million users today.

Yesterday, Bani Singh introduced WaitlistAPI, an easy, lightweight, and free tool to quickly set up a waitlist on your next project.

Inspired by her friend, Bani built WaitlistAPI to be a free tool suitable for a small side-project that can be implemented in 5 minutes.

Here are some of the early reactions from the community:

“I absolutely love simple and effective solutions like this one. Thanks for making this and congrats on the launch, Bani!” – Gleb Sabirzyanov

“Awesome! Can’t believe it took this long for this. Great work.” – Drew Wandzilak

“Congrats! Definitely a much needed service. I was planning to search if there is such a service. Glad to see it on PH. I found it now.” – Wilson Bright

Make Something People Want is the motto of Y Combinator and a guiding star for many makers.

If you want to launch a well-received product, consider taking a community-first approach. In simple words, pick a community and build something for them and not vice versa.

Some benefits of building an audience first:

1. They will be more likely to buy when you launch.
2. You’ll better understand exactly what they want.
3. You’ll build trust and brand awareness.

Here are some of the things you can do before you even start building:

1. Join or start a discussion.
2. Build in public by sharing progress on Twitter.
3. Create a pre-launch page.
4. Read and understand negative reviews of your competitors.

Luckily, there are tons of resources to help you build your audience. Here are some of our favorites:

Ship is a toolkit to generate demand, build an email list, communicate, and ship products.

Uplaunch is a ready-to-use landing page solution with eye-catching coming soon pages.

Luupro is the platform for you to get social about the projects you're working on.

GrowSurf is a customizable platform to create custom refer-a-friend programs built for startups.

ReferralMagic turns your users and customers into referral magnets.

Productboard is great for collecting customer feedback and sourcing new ideas.

Should I Make This? is a site to get feedback on your idea.

Faraday is a free no-code tool to build interactive flows and engage customers.

Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Zendesk for Startups.

It wasn't that long ago that Zendesk was a startup. The company got its start in 2007 in a Copenhagen loft, armed with a mission to build software that would help other companies build a great customer experience through a simple set of support tools.

Now worth more than $9 billion the company's early years forged an identity that remains key to its culture today: Zendesk is still very much a startup at heart and wants to thank this community. With customers ranging from Uber and Airbnb to Calm and Limebike, Zendesk has helped hyper-growth companies start-up and scale their customer support.

The challenge:

It can be challenging for startups to build a customer support function from the ground up, especially because time and resources are limited for young companies.

The solution:

6 free months of Zendesk products 🙌🏻

Included in this package is access to Sell. Sell launched on Product Hunt 2 years ago marking its first step in Zendesk's plan to introduce technology for sales among its suite of products. Along with Zendesk's more widely known customer support tools, this package includes:

• Exclusive access to a community of founders and partners
• Curated customer experience resources, office hours with Zendesk experts and events
• Try any number of Zendesk solutions to trial with 0 risk

Note: You must be a new customer, have fewer than 50 employees, and have raised venture funding up to Series A

Zendesk products include Support, Guide, Chat and Talk options. While customer preferences are constantly changing — and consumers expect to be able to interact with brands across many channels — this suite of products gives startups what they need to grow an omnichannel customer experience at-scale.

According to Cisco annual report, video is expected to make up 82% of internet traffic by 2021.

Combine these numbers with more people at home due to shelter in place and you have a pretty big market for video-based businesses.

Today, Y Combinator-backed entrepreneurs Luca Sanini and Akarsh Sanghi launched Reach.Live, a video monetization platform for creators.

Reach.Live targets creators and solopreneurs running lifestyle businesses. The platform is great for hosting free and paid live events. You can get a custom domain, engage with your community, and even sell stuff.

The global pandemic hit travel, education, finance, fitness, healthcare, entertainment, food, and virtually every other industry imaginable. People had to pivot quickly.

Increased constraints and necessity forced makers to create solutions to replace the “old” economy migrating most of the real-life activities online.

We’re seeing many more platforms emerge that help creators monetize video and innovate the aforementioned industries.

Here are some of the products that launched during the pandemic:

Stream makes it easy for anyone to start a live media business with 1-click Zoom live streams and integrated Stripe payments.

ZmURL is a personalized Zoom event website builder with event analytics and paid ticketing.

Together.LIVE is the one-stop-shop for managing and monetizing live online classes.

Hologram makes promoting and selling tickets to your Zoom classes easier.

Sutra Fitness can be used to host your live and on-demand classes, sell class packs, and subscriptions.

Krew provides a platform for PTs, physiotherapists, and nutritionists to offer all of their services online.

LiveKlass is an on-demand virtual classroom platform for creating, scheduling, and monetizing classes.

Twine is a platform that allows in-person content creators to manage their live streams with their students.